Carl MacDougalls new book, Scots  The Language of the People, is published by Black and White, priced £9.99. It follows a TV series on BBC Scotland. Born in 1941, he is single and lives in Glasgow

Between 1996 and 2000, I was the writer-in-residence for Perth and Kinross town council, which meant that I lived in the poet Willie Soutar’s house. Soutar died in 1943 after spending 13 years confined to his bed in a house in Perth, suffering from ankylosing spondylitis.

Soutar was highly influential, despite his disability. He was close to Hugh MacDiarmid during the renaissance of the Scots language in the middle part of last century. All the leading figures in that movement came through that house, which meant that living there was kind of spooky.

Not only was I writer-in-residence, I was lucky enough to be involved in the creation of an exhibition about Soutar to mark the centenary of his birth, in April 1898. There was basically a year of research and then, after the exhibition was staged in Perth, it toured the country, which is why I stayed in his